Portrait of Fyodor Chaliapin by Konstantin Korovin.
He was the greatest bass of his age and something rarer still — a singing actor who disappeared into every role he touched. Feodor Chaliapin's Boris Godunov, his Mephistopheles, his Don Quixote (a part Massenet wrote for him) were not performances so much as inhabitations, and offstage he sketched himself again and again in costume and greasepaint, studying the seam between the man and the mask.
Bass Denis Sedov and pianist Genadi Zagor trace that legacy through the repertoire Chaliapin made his own: Russian and French art songs, operatic arias, and the folk songs he carried from a Kazan childhood to the stages of Paris, Milan, and New York.
